These findings, whilst shocking, are not particularly surprising. Current trends are heading in the wrong direction. The IFS have also predicted child poverty will soon reach record levels. The JRF’s four proposed solutions – ensure support keeps up with costs, make work pay, reduce housing costs and improve prospects – highlight, and this cannot be emphasised enough, that poverty is structural.

Perhaps, however, the most disheartening aspect of today’s launch was the response by the Chair of the Education Select Committee. Robert Halfon MP emphasised the injustice experienced for those “not even at the foot of the ladder of opportunity” and wanted to see a society in which everybody could rise to the top. Private schools should pay a levy and bring in society’s most disadvantaged children and we should ‘focus on character’ through mechanisms such as a more elaborate National Citizenship Service to help aspiration and ‘troubled families’.

First of all, it is impossible for everybody to rise to the top. Even if you believe in the concept of social mobility, those in lower socio-economic positions cannot move up the ‘ladder of opportunity’ if those already up there are ‘better educated’, have powerful social networks and generally opportunity hoard. You cannot focus on just one end of the so-called ladder of opportunity.

Secondly, a focus on character and troubled families is typical of a conceptualisation of poverty that places blame on the individual. The Troubled Families Programme, launched in the wake of the 2011 riots, is emblematic of this approach to poverty. It has been criticised for not addressing structural issues and merely teaching ‘troubled families’ to ‘learn to be poor’.

Poverty is not mere economic hardship. The JRF report states that 25% of those in the bottom fifth of the income distribution suffer from depression or anxiety. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen recognised the psycho-social harm brought on by poverty more than 30 years ago, and whilst we can be tempted to lose ourselves in these new statistics, these trends represent the 14m people that are struggling to make ends meet.